Leading on tackling current and future skills gaps in partnership with the sector’s key players

The delivering better skills for better places action plan is led by the HCA, with participation and support from key organisations across the sector, all with a role in its design and delivery. It builds on many of the successful projects and national, regional and local initiatives already underway by some of the partner organisations. Each partner has been working towards similar ambitions and delivering better skills for better places combines these energies to achieve those ambitions.

The ultimate objective is to produce knowledgeable and skilled practitioners with a combination of technical, specialist and transferable skills who can work effectively together to deliver sustainable places. In broad terms, action will be focused on:

• Raising the profile of the sustainable communities sector
• Opening up more entry routes to the professions and encouraging more entrants
• Developing a new generation of flexible training programmes to increase and improve skills and reduce staff turnover
• Implementing new and more flexible ways of working, in particular multi-disciplinary team working

Mind the Skills Gap report (published in Sept 07), highlighted skills shortages in the sustainable communities sector and the project aims to align what people are doing so that there is a coherent approach to tackling skills gaps across the sector.

Why is it needed?

Progress has been made already, the regional centres of excellence, sector skills councils and professional institutes, yet urgent action is still needed or else skills shortages could grow so fast that within five years there wouldn’t be enough skilled professionals to create and maintain good places.

We have identified significant generic skills gaps, in particular project management, leadership, breakthrough thinking, multi-disciplinary working and community engagement. There were also gaps in specialist knowledge, especially around carbon and cohesion.

How will we know if we've been successful?

Initially, success will be getting the right people involved. This should lead to greater understanding and improved ways of working between partners, including the potential for giving formal recognition for one another’s activities, including training programmes and qualifications.

In the medium term, the Plan should lead to generic skills being better embedded in the development of all professionals and more effective multi-disciplinary team working. There should be greater co-ordination in addressing sector-wide problems, such as raising the image of key professions and improving recruitment. The Plan should also give the sector a clearer voice to Government and agencies such as Higher Education Funding Council and the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions.

In the longer term, we would expect to see fewer skills and labour shortages. The full suite of generic skills should be embedded in the initial training and continuous professional development of all professionals involved in creating and maintaining sustainable communities.

For more information

Contact Nancy Atkinson on 0113 394 9401 or email
Nancy.Atkinson@hca.gsx.gov.uk

Our partners

We want to involve everyone with responsibility for skills for sustainable communities in the plan, but currently we are working with the following organisations:

• Asset Skills
• British Urban Regeneration Association (BURA)
• Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH)
• Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE)
• Communities and Local Government (CLG)
• Construction Industry Council (CIC)
• Construction Skills
• Contaminated Land: Applications in Real Environments (CL:AIRE)
• HCA ATLAS
• Improvement and Development Agency for local government (IDeA)
• Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE)
• Institute for Economic Development (IED)
• Landscape Institute
• National Planning Forum (NPF)
• Planning Advisory Service (PAS)
• Royal Institution of British Architects (RIBA)
• Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS)
• Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI)
• The Sustainable Communities Excellence Network
• Town & Country Planning Association (TCPA)
• Urban Design Alliance (UDAL)
• Urban Design Group (UDG)